Slashdot Mirror
World's Oldest Bible Going Online
99luftballon writes "The British Museum is putting online the remaining fragments of the world's oldest Bible. The Codex Sinaiticus dates to the fourth century BCE and was discovered in the 19th century. Very few people have seen it due to its fragile state — that and the fact that parts of it are in collections scattered across the globe. It'll give scholars and those interested their first chance to take a look. However, I've got a feeling that some people won't be happy to see it online, since it makes no mention of the resurrection, which is a central part of Christian belief."On Thursday the Book of Psalms and the Gospel According to Mark will go live at the Codex Sinaiticus site. The plan is to have all the material up, with translations and commentaries, a year from now.
You know what I like the best about this version of the Bible? The part about gay marriage. Look it up!
You just got troll'd!
Where to start, where to start...
You can start by noting that Slashdot contributors are 90% atheists and they go out of their way to come up with dishonest ways to badmouth Christianity and people who believe in a creator. On Slashdot, you can badmouth God all you want but you can't say anything against Darwin, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, evolution, time travel, the big bang and the like. The mendacity on Slashdot is so thick, you'd think you were living in the third Reich or Stalinist Russia.
thats because it's a made up fairy tale and it didn't happen. it's amazing to me that everyone this day and age doesn't get this.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Well, you assumed wrong.
I have read it and then threw it out as the worse novel I ever had the misfortune to read.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
that doesn't mean fuck all. just because they believe in baby jesus it doesn't stop them imprisoning and murdering Christians in the middle east.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Oh is the poor little god bother bothered?
I don't know what percentage of people on Slashdot are atheists or not, and I don't really care (it would change all the time anyway, as people stop posting, and other people start posting).
However, to say that you can bad mouth god (a being for which there is no material evidence, only faith), but not "Darwin, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, evolution, time travel, the big bang" etc. is just wrong.
You can, it is just that people who actually follow the scientific method, and/or are materialists and thus try and have evidence for what they say or believe in, will jump on you if you say something stupid.
Take evolution for example, only idiots and ignorant people say that evolution doesn't exist, because there is so much evidence for it.
I don't know why you mentioned time travel, I don't have an opinion as to if it is possible one way or the other, because I don't have enough evidence. I have "gut feelings", but they aren't worth much.
The "big bang", what bad shit could you say about that? It was a bad thing? It didn't happen? The first is irrelevant, and the second requires evidence.
I didn't know the meaning of the word "mendacity", so I looked it up. The tendency to lie? You think that people on Slashdot lie about these things? So I assume you mean that saying that evolution is a fact is a lie... Well, if you are that delusional...
Oh yeah, did I mention that religion sucks and is a farce?
Religion causes more problems then it solves. Suck on it.
(To the mods: Karma bonus not initiated, no need to mod down. But if you do, you should mod down the parent for their comment as well.)
I wank in the shower.
And then you realize that -oops- the bible is also the most accurately kept book of all times. Whether you have faith in God or not, you'd have to admit that there are lines found on parchment dating back a millenium before christ (the dead sea scrolls), that appear verbatim in the currently accepted bible. This doesn't prove nothing ever changed (since it's about 12 lines of the text), but the mere fact that they agree and that we can actually still read them is extremely special.
The bible has a secure claim of being the oldest preserved book (or, if you don't have faith, that part of it contains a copy of the oldest preserved book). Not the oldest book, but the oldest that you can reasonably hope to read.
The mere fact that we still have this codex, and the care invested in keeping it safe for future generations, should illustrate just how much faith you can put in the text of the bible being unchanged. It is also a very incomplete codex.
Do you believe WWI happened ? Well we are MORE certain about the bible being unchanged than we are about that little event actually having had place. We don't have a single reliable wittness, and only inconsistent, conflicting accounts that mostly agree on a small subset of what they describe. That small "mostly agreed upon" subset is accepted as historical truth.
All of history is uncertain. That the text of the bible hasn't been changed in nearing 2 millenia is one of the most trusted assumptions in any serious historical course. It is also VERY uncommon for any source to be that reliable.
By contrast, neither the vedas nor the quran can claim even 100 years of constant text (the current quran was "edited" together in 1923 in Cairo, and originally contained the warning that it was pieced together from unreliable sources, of even the accepted sources (they rejected about 20x more text than they accepted for being "probably made up on the spot") which about 30% STILL isn't deciphered, the vedas don't have real unity, we know they date back much farther than the bible, but only from external sources, there aren't any actual vedas backdating more than 600 years, this bible by contrast is nearing it's 2000th birthday). Of course in the case of the quran they hide the older texts for fear of getting blown up (like the one in constantinopel).
I'm terribly sorry to have the negative comment on this article, because I'm sure a lot of you are going to mod me down for this. But I think that the point of view that this article has no place as /. news article is a valid issue to be discussed, so please don't discard my opinion without considering it, because I mean it in the spirit of open discussion.
/.
Why is this considered newsworthy? I understand the science and technology of recovering and archiving ancient texts for future research, and it is a noble end and vital if we learned any lesson from the library at Alexandria. But this article isn't about the science of it, or the tech of it. It is about a specific book being archived and shared for public viewing, which I do not consider news.
If this book was just as old, but NOT the bible, would it have been submitted? I wasn't forced to read it, and I'm not offended by it. But I'm more so concerned with something that to me core seems like a contradiction to the tenet of "News for Nerds, News that Matters".
Basically, no topics should be holy. By which I mean that no subject should get preferential treatment in any way. And I feel that the only way this article could have gotten onto the main page is through the bias many people inherently give toward giving validity and credence to the relevance of Christianity (and all religion in general).
Religious topics have a place for discussion, but considering the damage Christianity (and other religions) has caused to science historically, I do not think that place is on
If anything, I believe the appropriate discussion regarding religion would be regarding the direct contradictions between the empirical evidence used in scientific study and the present positions held in current theology.
Is it not more important for the progression of scientific reasoning to address the sincere danger posed by religion on influencing the general perception of the public regarding a host of complex issues such as evolution, genetic research, and medical technology? Because the majority of Americans still believe in a "giant invisible man in the sky" interpretation of religion, if I am to trust the polls I have seen over a period of years and if you'll excuse the callous categorization of that type. I have also seen a number of polls which have shown a correlation between levels of education and religiosity being inversely proportional, which I hope I can trust without being more arrogant than I have already been. Perhaps the correlation can affect behavior in the direction opposite from the intuitive "education implies skepticism which implies questioning of faith". Perhaps by directly confronting people about the absurdity of their beliefs relative to scientific explanations would affect education in that it would spurn people to be skeptics about many other things in the world around them.
Just my two cents, no offense intended.
Get in the way of a good Christian-bashing. After all Bush is Christian (not that anyone ever checked :-p), that proves they're all evil, right ?
By contrast pointing out that the founder of islam was a thieving (took things from people violently) paedophile (f*cked children below 9 years old) rapist (f*cked said child without her permission, using force, also others) is a fact (according to muslim sources), yet apparently here facts are not important, and have to be denied.
Of course said thieving paedophile rapist also killed women for criticizing him, and left their children to die (google "asma bint marwan").
Perhaps Jesus should have murdered some more women and children, and stolen more. Surely it seems that would have raised his standing on slashdot (and elsewhere) enormously.
Finding the few stupidest comments made by a group of hundreds of millions of people proves what exactly?
And then you realize that -oops- the bible is also the most accurately kept book of all times.
Wrong.
you'd have to admit that there are lines found on parchment dating back a millenium before christ (the dead sea scrolls)
Wrong.
that appear verbatim in the currently accepted bible
Wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls
If I had to nominate something as a candidate for "most accurately-kept ancient text" I'd probably go for something like G. Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, which are so well-known that they are a standard text in first-year Latin classes, but that's probably a reflection of my own areas of familiarity.
Do Americans still have first-year Latin classes? I guess it's probably been superseded by "cheerleading" or something like that.
I would be surprised if anything older than 250 BCE is found, since that is when Aristotle wrote Poetics - a university text book on how to write religious texts. Obviously after he wrote Poetics, the bible texts blossomed as every two bit poet tried his hand at it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This is truly a slash dot moment.
You all are actually arguing about a collective fantasy written so loooong ago, by soooo many different men, compiled from various other fantasy's that there are no records that can prove anything to back up any of your assertations.
I can't wait until "they" rewrite "the bible" (it doesn't deserve capitals) with george bush and dick cheney (and neither do they deserve capitals) as "great prophets".
It's only a matter of time, and I'm sure that in a thousand years many fools will believe that nonsense as "the truth" too (it's out there man...).
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks